'Since that morning in the police-court I read these things. This, as you know, was the story of a working girl--an orphan of seventeen--who crawled with the dead body of her new-born child to her master's back door and left the baby there. She dragged herself a little way off and fainted. A few days later she found herself in court being tried for the murder of her child. Her master, a married man, had of course reported the "find" at his back door to the police, and he had been summoned to give evidence. The girl cried out to him in the open court, "You are the father!" He couldn't deny it. The coroner, at the jury's request, censured the man, and regretted that the law didn't make him responsible. But'--she leaned down from the plinth with eyes blazing--'he went scot free. And that girl is at this moment serving her sentence in Strangeways Gaol.' Through the moved and murmuring crowd, Jean forced her way, coming in between Lady John and Stonor, who stood there immovable. The girl strained to bring her lips near his ear. 'Why do you dislike her so?' 'I?' he said. 'Why should you think----' 'I never saw you look as you did;' with a vaguely frightened air she added, 'as you do.' 'Men make boast'--the voice came clear from the monument--'that an English citizen is tried by his peers. What woman is tried by hers?' 'She mistakes the sense in which the word was employed,' said a man who looked like an Oxford Don. But there was evidently a sense, larger than that one purely academic, in which her use of the word could claim its pertinence. The strong feeling that had seized her as she put the question was sweeping the crowd along with her. 'A woman is arrested by a man, brought before a man judge, tried by a jury of men, condemned by men, taken to prison by a man, and by a man she's hanged! Where in all this were _her_ "peers"? Why did men, when British justice was born--why did they so long ago insist on trial by "a jury of their peers"? So that justice shouldn't miscarry--wasn't it? A man's peers would best understand his circumstances, his temptation, the degree of his guilt. Yet there's no such unlikeness between different classes of men as exists between man and woman. What man has the knowledge that makes him a fit judge of woman's deeds at that time of anguish--that hour that some woman struggled through to put each man here into the world. I noticed when a previous speaker quoted the Labour Party, you applauded. Some of you here, I gather, call yourselves Labour men. Every woman who has borne a child is a Labour woman. No man among you can judge what she goes through in her hour of darkness.' Jean's eyes had dropped from her lover's set white face early in the recital. But she whispered his name. He seemed not to hear. The speaker up there had caught her fluttering breath, and went on so low that people strained to follow.